Tag Archives: transgender history

“The Central City Anti-Poverty Program Office opened that fall as a result of the Tenderloin neighborhood organizing campaign. This multiservice agency included an office for the police community-relations officer to the homophile community, a police sergeant by the name of Elliott Blackstone. One afternoon shortly after the agency opened, a transgender neighborhood resident named Louise Ergestrasse came into Blackstone’s office, threw a copy of Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon on his desk, and demanded that Blackstone do something for ‘her people.’ Blackstone was willing to be educated on the matter, and he soon took a leading role in changing police treatment of transgender people.”

“In 1986, while [Lou] Sullivan was working to establish the GLBT archives in San Francisco, he also organized the first FTM-only support and education organization in the United States. Called simply ‘FTM,’ the organization held monthly ‘FTM Gatherings,’ featuring educational programs and opportunities to socialize and also published the FTM Newsletter, which quickly became the leading source of information in the nation for female-to-male issues. Because of Sullivan’s leadership role and his own gay identity, the San Francisco FTM group has always attracted a sexually diverse core membership and has avoided many of the divisions that had plagued similar MTF organizations since the 1960s. The openness was reflected in the newsletter’s editorial slant and helped shape group sensibilities in the community of transmen that started blossoming in the 1980s under Sullivan’s guidance. That organization became FTM International, the largest FTM group in the world; its San Francisco chapter is now called the Lou Sullivan Society.”

“Adolf Hitler personally denounced Hirschfeld, who was a socialist as well as a homosexual as ‘the most dangerous Jew in Germany.'”

Who was this dangerous man?

Magnus Hirschfeld was a sexologist in the early 20th century. He was also “a pioneering advocate for transgender people. As early as 1910 he had written The Transvestites, the first book-length treatment of transgender phenomenon. He worked with the Berlin police department to end the harassment and targeting for arrest of transgender people. Transgender people worked on the staff of the Institute for Sexual Science (albeit as receptionists and maids), and some were part of Hirschfeld’s social circle as well, including Dora Richter. Richter underwent the first documented male-to-female genital transformation surgery in 1931, arranged on her behalf by Hirschfeld himself. Hirschfeld was the linchpin, and his institute the hub, of the international network of transgender people and progressive medical experts who set the stage for the post-World War II transgender movement.”

He probably did not invent the word, transvestite, however. You can read more about the origin of the word here.

Hirschfeld left Germany and “in 1933, fascist vigilantes ransacked and destroyed Hirschfeld’s Institute in Berlin.” Hirschfeld settled on the French Riviera.